Chinese Communist Party's aggression is hurting US and others too

China and US with a strong economy and military though show to the international media that they are trying to clear differences, trying to ease their policies against each other, but in actual they are fighting a war behind the screen. A war of hacking each others's computers and stealing sensitive information and spying on top officials' email accounts.

The report says that both US and China are trying to do their best in hacking and spying but for a while US is in defensive mode whereas  

China has an immensely aggressive, or rather avid stance.

"The attacks coming out of China are not only continuing, they are accelerating"

―says Alan Paller, director of research at information-security training group SANS Institute in Washington, DC, as quoted by the Reuters.

It is believed that China has hacked terrabytes of information from US computers which comprise of almost any single information, from user names and passwords to the design of sophisticated weapon systems. China's policy has been to copy things and declare it as their own. China lacks new ideas thinkers so they have mastered in the art of copying and stealing.

It is not like that US never tried to hack chinese systems, just that they have not much learn from the chinese because all the information are stolen mainly from US or known to US.

A cable accessed by the Reuters through Wikileaks says that the attacks were coming from the sites which were registered in the city of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province in central China. The Reuters also named the person as Chen Xingpeng whose job was to set up the websites using the "precise" postal code in Chengdu used by the People's Liberation Army Chengdu Province First Technical Reconnaissance Bureau (TRB), an electronic espionage unit of the Chinese military.

Not only military and political data was leaked but China also tried its greedy hands on US companies and market. Many tech companies, oil and gas companies and companies in financial sector reported that their systems were hacked at some or the other point of the time.

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Major search engine, Google also said that their email service Gmail was hacked and many accounts were compromised who ever interfered in China's internal policy.

James A. Lewis, a former US diplomat says that the reason why China is these days trying so much to get access to US, Indians and other country's system is to keep its economy growing and at the second position.

"They've identified innovation as crucial to future economic growth -- but they're not sure they can do it," says Lewis. "The easiest way to innovate is to plagiarise" by stealing US intellectual property, he adds as quoted by the Reuters.

Main Source: Chinese and US Electronic Hacking and Spying War

CONTEMPORARY CHINA'S MIRROR IMAGE: IMPERIAL GERMANY

Original article by KirkRogers 04/25/2010 

China has emerged as the bad boy on the global scene, pushing around executives at Rio Tinto, attacking Google, and humiliating Barack Obama at the Copenhagen Climate Talks. Speculation is growing about China’s rising power and the country’s leaders are displaying a discouraging sense of hubris. There is growing fear that the autocratic Middle Kingdom will soon dominate the world. 

These fears have parallels with another rising power of a century ago: Imperial Germany. Both emerged quickly on the global scene and did so with an enormous chip on their shoulders. Like China today, Germany was a little late coming to the industrial revolution, though its cultural contribution to European civilization and in turn to American civilization was enormous (Ralph Waldo Emerson was passionate student of Goethe). Only after its final unification and triumph over the French in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 could Otto von Bismarck, the great 19th century pragmatist, force Germany’s sundry states into union. 

Again like China, once united and in control of its own destiny, Germany grew quickly, harboring ever more delusions about its place in the sun. In the years leading to the First World War Wilhelm I, the competent Bismarck confidant, died of cancer. This allowed vainglorious Wilhelm II to assume the mantle of the state in 1888. Prussian militarism by then was backed by a massive industrial machine operating in complete fealty to the state. Germany’s new Emperor and his clique felt that it had something to prove. 

China, once the most advanced nation on earth, similarly has a passel of historical resentments ranging from the Opium War to the complete denigration of its standing in the world. Like Germany, China has viewed itself as an advanced culture whose time had now arrived. Like Germany in the late 19th Century, it has incorporated technologies from others about as fast as it could get its hands on them. 

When Deng Zhao Ping awoke China from its Maoist/Stalinist nightmare that ripped through the country under the guise of the Cultural Revolution, they were confronted with the disintegration of communist governments around the world. Chinese leaders knew that the only way to for them to hold power was to have their economy grow. This approach parallels the economic pragmatism in late Imperial Germany under Bismarck and the Hohenzollerns, who pushed economic growth as a means of promoting social welfare while simultaneously doing all they can to consolidate power in their hands. Bismarck created the first social security system not out of a deep seated concern for the proletariat but to emasculate the socialist party. 

China by the same token has not adopted capitalism because they want to move the country towards rule of law and greater democracy but as a means of justifying their continued presence at the country’s helm. China, much like Imperial Germany, has witnessed unbelievable growth because of these centralized policies. 

On the eve of WWI, Germany was the second largest economy in the world after shooting ahead of Britain and trailing America. China just accomplished a similar feat in an even shorter time frame. China passed contemporary Germany a couple of years ago and is poised to do so with Japan in the coming year. China is cultivating a modern-style imperial presence in Iran, Africa and Latin America in an effort to secure the natural resources that the country lacks much like Germany did. Ironically, China is doing more to raise living standards in Africa than any western aid program has been able to do. 

German industrial bosses were elites, most bore the titles of nobility. China’s bosses have been compared to the Emperor’s corrupt courtesans. The vast wealth of the Thyssen and Krupp steel dynasties can still be seen today in the massive industrial museums lining the Ruhr Valley. As in Imperial Germany, the military dominates large swaths of the economy. Germany in the late 19th and early twentieth century used its coal and iron resources to build the munitions factories that lined the despoiled Ruhr and Rhine. Holding even tighter on the reigns, China has developed an a strong state-dominated economy, forcing, for example, foreign firms to enter a joint venture with a state-owned corporation, which will quickly steal what it can of the western company’s intellectual property. 

The two governments bear disturbing similarities. Germany also had a vast bureaucracy attempting to tamp down any sedition amongst its masses. China is doing much the same. The most interesting parallel however is the rampant nationalism propagated in both Imperial Germany then and contemporary China. 

Of course, there are also some significant differences. China, for example, is much larger than Germany ever was. China is also not necessarily as instinctively expansionist . But it is extremely sensitive when it comes to Taiwan. The kerfuffle over arms sales to Taiwan last month provides more than enough evidence of this. Germany also had territories that it got very sensitive about as well. China’s attitude towards Taiwan and Tibet echoes the Kaiser’s sentiment towards occupying Strasbourg along the French border. 

Is China going to attack its neighbors and plunge the Pacific Rim into World War Three? It seems highly unlikely. China still has a lot of growing left to do. Large swaths of the peasantry are still stumbling along at poverty levels. China is also well aware of the US military’s ability to project force should it try to attack Taiwan. 

China may want to occupy Taiwan and there is none of the rhetoric among the leadership cadre about the need for Lebensraum that dominated conversations in German salons before the Great War. China’s leadership also appears far more competent than that of late Imperial Germany. But this may have to do with dumb luck. The Hohenzollerns up until Wilhelm II were all competent leaders. Could China be so unlucky as well? Could one idiot weasel his way up through the CP ranks? Who knows? 

China has serious problems with restive minorities and a growingly arrogant and repressive regime. It has industrial might, a massive resentment of western powers and a desire to get its own place in the sun. It does not have the same geographical pressures that Germany had and it is still not in any position to take on the US in the military theater and its rulers realize that. Though its economy is inflating, much of the population living below the poverty line. 

So far the technocrats over the last thirty years have been freakishly capable and have generally done a good job. The real trial of China’s claim to its place in the sun will be when a blustering fool like Kaiser Wilhelm weasels his way into the party chairmanship. Just as Germany was powerless to dispose of its ill-suited leader, China may very well be as well. If that happens, God help us all. 

Excerpts of "The Black Book of Communism"

 

Pertinent quotes from the best-selling book 

"The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression":

[by several European academics and edited by Stéphane Courtois]

“To be sure, the [communistic] model was applied differently in different cultural settings. As Margolin points out, the chief agent of repression in Russia was a specially created political police, the Cheka-GPU-NKVD-KGB, while in China it was the People's Liberation Army, and in Cambodia it was gun-toting adolescents from the countryside: thus popular ideological mobilization went deeper in Asia than in Russia.

Still, everywhere the aim was to repress "enemies of the people" — "like noxious insects," as Lenin said early on, thus inaugurating Communism's "animalization" of its adversaries. Moreover, the line of inheritance from Stalin, to Mao, to Ho, to  Kim II Sung, to Pol Pot was quite clear, with each new leader receiving both material aid and ideological inspiration from his predecessor.”

[Editor Stéphane Courtois asserts that "...Communist regimes...turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government". He cites a death toll which totals 94 million, not counting the "excess deaths"

(decrease of the population due to lower than-expected birth rates). Deaths given by Courtois is as follows]

“It is not always easy to distinguish between events caused by fighting between rulers and rebels and events that can properly be described only as a massacre of the civilian population. Nonetheless, we have to start somewhere. The following rough approximation, based on unofficial estimates, gives some sense of the scale and gravity of these crimes: 

Deaths due to Communism Country Name Number of Deaths U.S.S.R. 20 million China 65 million Vietnam 1 million North Korea 2 million Cambodia 2 million Eastern Europe 1 million Latin America 150,000 Africa 1.7 million Afghanistan 1.5 million

The international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power: about 10,000 deaths.

The total approaches 100 million people killed.

The immense number of deaths conceals some wide disparities according to context. Unquestionably, if we approach these figures in terms of relative weight, first place goes to Cambodia, where Pol Pot, in three and a half years, engaged in the most atrocious slaughter, through torture and widespread famine, of about one-fourth of the country's total population.

However, China's experience under Mao is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of people who lost their lives. As for the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin, the blood turns cold at its venture into planned, logical, and "politically correct" mass slaughter.”

“And the less familiar figures in Margolin's chapter in "China: A Long March into Night" are even more staggering: at a minimum, 10 million "direct victims"; probably 20 million deaths out of the multitudes that passed through China's "hidden Gulag," the laogai; more than 20 million deaths from the "political famine" of the Great Leap Forward of 1959-1961, the largest famine in history.”

“During Mao's Cultural Revolution, priceless treasures were smashed or burned by the Red Guards. Yet however terrible this destruction may ultimately prove for the nations in question and for humanity as a whole, how does it compare with the mass murder of human beings — of men, women, and children?”

"The book's second point is that there never was a benign, initial phase of Communism before some mythical "wrong turn" threw it off track."

[The Black Book of Communism received praise in a number of publications in the United States and Britain, including the Times Literary Supplement, New York Times Book Review, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, The New Republic, National Review and The Weekly Standard   ]